


Flowers Don't Grow Here

by Portrait_of_a_Fool



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Explicit Language, Insanity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-18 20:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portrait_of_a_Fool/pseuds/Portrait_of_a_Fool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam got five years instead of a lifetime and even he knows that was the longshot of all optimistic outlooks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flowers Don't Grow Here

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place five years after 6x11. It was written for the [Queensland Flood Relief](http://waltzmatildah.livejournal.com/67134.html?) fandom auction.

** Flowers Don’t Grow Here **

_“the bad days and the bad nights now come too  
often,  
the old dream of having a few easy  
years before death—  
that dream vanished as the other dreams  
have.  
too bad, too bad, too bad.”_   


— Charles Bukowski  
“Misbegotten Paradise”

There are leeches in Sam’s throat, he can feel their slimy, throbbing bodies as they suck his blood and swell with it. The bigger they grow, the tighter his throat becomes until his breath is this reedy whistling sound as he tries to force air into his aching lungs as he claws desperately at his neck. The leeches pulse in time to his heartbeat and there is this constant, low hurt like a million little needles draining him from the inside out. He’s alone in the motel room, Dean’s gone off to some bar somewhere and he tries to go for the door thinking in his mad, dying panic that he will make it down the street to his brother and he will help him. Staggering with black spots popping like poison eclipses in his eyes, Sam reaches for the doorknob, but falls to his knees instead. In his throat, the leeches twitch and throb, _thump-thump-thump_ with his stuttering, rapid pulse.

Then they burst, over-full and glutted to the extreme on his life. Blood flies everywhere when they explode, flying in a jet from Sam’s gasping mouth and out of his nose from the sheer force of the rupture. His throat is clear though, disgusting mess that his blood is making everywhere aside and he sucks in a greedy breath only to inhale a rush of thick red. He’s falling forward then, still trying to breathe through the sticky blood in his lungs and drowning in it instead.

 _No, not like this_ , is his only thought because of all the ways he’s died, this is the worst. He’s drowning in his own blood with the ragged remains of leeches clinging to his lower lip and it can’t end this way, it just can’t.

Sam tries to drag himself across the floor, but his vision is bleeding to solid black, all of the exploding dots melting together to form an impenetrable curtain and it’s done; it’s over, he can’t stop it…

With a strangled cry, Sam wakes up in the creaking motel room bed, hands clawing at his throat even as he jerks upright. Sweat has soaked through his clothes and into the sheets beneath him, but he’s shivering like he’s freezing.

“Fuck, shit, _Christ_ ,” he says in a shaking, broken voice. Hunching over on himself, Sam rakes his fingers painfully through his hair. Then he just keeps doing it, over and over, until his scalp is burning and his fingertips are damp with blood, skin under his nails. There’s hair wrapped around his fingertips like thin pieces of thread, pinching and cutting off the circulation, making his fingers tingle coldly.

He’s slipping, every day another piece of his mind goes and he’s done what Death asked of him—he hasn’t scratched at the wall in his mind, but it’s coming down around him anyway. He’s had five years; five _pretty good_ years, half the price of a basic soul contract. It makes sense that he’s out of time though, given what’s wrong with him. Death had said a lifetime, but he got half a decade, which is maybe fair considering the type of life he leads; Sam doesn’t know. He _does_ know he wants to sit down and beg, plead, bargain and barter with anyone or any _thing_ that will work with him. He’s done none of that though because there is _nothing_ short of the hand of God perhaps that can fix the tumbling blocks of his sanity or repair his lightning-struck kite of a soul. It’s terrifying though, this feeling and awareness of losing his mind, watching breaches form in his subconscious to leak into his conscious mind. Reality is increasingly hard to distinguish from fantasy at least on some days, but soon Sam won’t know the difference one way or the other; his ability to differentiate will slide away from him like skin off a corpse.

So far he’s been able to hide it from Dean, but he won’t be able to keep up the charade indefinitely. Things are minor for now, at least compared to how bad Sam knows it will get. He has the nightmares, which Dean thinks he understands and accepts Sam’s lies about them being about hell. In a way, Sam supposes they aren’t total lies—it’s just a different kind of hell he’s starting to refer to.

A year, six months, maybe just three weeks is all Sam’s got left to go before he has a total breakdown and he knows that. Then he won’t be able to hide it from Dean, he won’t even have the _sense_ necessary to think about hiding it, much less the ability to _do_ it. One morning in the not too distant future, Dean will wake up to Sam drooling on himself and cutting his face off with pieces of broken mirror glass. Or maybe he’ll come awake to the sounds of Sam screaming and fighting with shadows, tangling with them and trying to fend them off. It could come with no warning, just one day his mind will completely crack over lunch on the side of the road somewhere and he could very well throw himself in front of a Mack truck, giggling and crying, screaming about the tongue of God being crammed down his throat. Perhaps he will lose his mind one day and stab his brother to death because he thinks he’s one of Them.

 _Them_ , who Sam is becoming terribly familiar with in his newly blooming paranoia. _Them_ , like Stephen King’s “Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Sam just thinks of Them as Low Men though because he could give a damn what color Their coats are. That is, if _his_ Low Men even wear coats.

Paranoia is the foundation of their lives, but this… this is different. This is schizophrenic paranoia, which isn’t exactly right, but Sam doesn’t have the words for what this really is, so he falls back on the old standby: schizo; he’s going _schizo_. The bitter laugh that bubbles up out of Sam’s throat as he drags his blood-moist fingers down the side of his neck makes his stomach flip with nausea borne of nerves and fear and yes, _sorrow_. He’s sad, so fucking sad because he’s going to lose everything in time, no matter what they’ve done or the sacrifices they’ve made. But somehow, Sam knows that, too; he always has because again, just like Stephen King said: everything’s eventual.

The sour little voice whispering in his mind, breathing into both of his ears—crazy in stereo—tells Sam that They are behind this, that They—the Low Men—have had it out for him for years and now They’re exacting Their toll. Sam agrees, but tells it to shut up all the same because he still has enough sense left to know that the voice is a liar; it’s not even _real_. Except maybe it is.

“No,” Sam grates out and buries his face in his hands.

The room is silent but for the low electric hum of the alarm clock on the nightstand between the beds. A glance at it from between his fingers tells Sam that it is 9:13PM. It’s still early, which he’s glad for because it means Dean won’t be back until after last call is bellowed out in the smoky roadhouse Sam left him hustling pool in earlier. He’d gone out with him, glad for the fresh air and a break from the humdrum that’s been a dry spell for them lately, but not an hour into their outing, Sam had made an excuse about being tired and left. The real reason is that he was getting a headache from trying to keep an eye on all the faces leering at him from the dark paneling around the barroom. More of _Them_ , that voice snickers in Sam’s ears and he slaps himself on the side of the head so hard his ears ring.

“Shut. Up,” he grates out, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard he sees spots. He’s thinking about how at least those spots are real when the mattress sinks down on his left and he jumps half a foot in the air. Landing back on the mattress, nearly toppling over sideways, Sam looks around with wide eyes and finds Castiel sitting calmly beside him.

“Hello, Sam,” he says and Sam just keeps staring.

He wants to ask, _How’d you get in here?_ even though he knows the truth; knows that they told Castiel where they were staying. It doesn’t stop the paranoid tickle in his mind that tells him Castiel knew how to find him because he’s _watching_ him and Dean. Scheming maybe, plotting their demise or maybe he’s made a truce with Raphael—stop the war in Heaven and Castiel will give him the Winchesters.

With a low, miserable sound, Sam shoves those thoughts away as well and leans into Castiel, burying his face against his shoulder. “Make it stop,” he whispers, hands coming up to clutch at Castiel’s coat. “I want it to stop. Please, Cas, make it go away.”

“I cannot,” Castiel says and his voice is ripe with so much grief that Sam knows he’s telling the truth, just like he always is when Sam begs that of him. Sam almost sobs when he runs a hand down the back of his head, soothing him. “I wish that I could.”

Sam just clings to him harder and he hates being like this, hates Castiel seeing him like this, but it’s better that it’s him and not Dean. Sam’s not sure why, but he’s pretty sure Dean may laugh at him and tell Them and then the Low Men will come and… _he has got to stop this_.

“I’m losing my mind,” Sam says and finally draws back from the angel a little bit to look at him in the dark. “It’s going, piece by piece and minute by minute.”

“I know,” Castiel says and touches Sam’s cheek. “I know,” he repeats and leans in to press a kiss to Sam’s mouth. “I am sorry.”

“So am I,” Sam says and laughs, the sound skittering over the walls like nails on a blackboard.

Sam can almost see the sound as it gouges through the cheap wallpaper and plaster into the next room. The hallucinations are growing more vivid, but at least they’re still infrequent; today has been the worst day so far. _So far_ , Sam repeats to himself, soon they’ll be so much worse and he knows that, too. Knowledge of insanity—it’s a son of a bitch, he thinks and slides down in the bed, one hand still holding to Castiel’s coat in a death grip.

The urge to throw the covers over his face is great, but he resists it and shivers when Castiel cards his fingers through his hair again. He feels the tingle of Castiel’s magic sliding over his clawed scalp, healing the gouged places he left behind after his fit. He can hear the rustle of the hair he ripped out growing back and he shivers again. Castiel can heal his body, but he can do nothing for his mind and Sam knows that it’s killing him that he can’t do it. He can see it every time he looks into Castiel’s ancient blue eyes and sometimes he wonders just how much Castiel regrets ever falling in love with him. Sam figures it’s got to be a lot; he’d regret falling in love with himself if he knew this was going to happen. No one wants to be strapped to a psychotic with a Swiss cheese soul, not even an angel that’s so much like a man sometimes it’s eerie.

“You can leave if you want to,” Sam says. “I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I am not going anywhere,” Castiel says and slides down in the bed beside Sam.

Turning to face him, Sam blinks at him in the darkness and reaches out, stroking a fingertip down the bridge of Castiel’s nose, laughing a real laugh when he goes cross-eyed trying to follow the movement.

“You should,” Sam whispers as he moves closer to Castiel, breathing in his clean sunshine scent as he wraps his long body around him, taking comfort from his nearness. “There won’t be much left before long.”

“I will still be here,” Castiel says. “Even when the last shred of your sanity is gone.”

“Thanks. Really,” Sam says dryly and closes his eyes.

Castiel’s hand comes up to pet through his tangled hair, down the back of his neck and finally he leaves it still between Sam’s shoulder blades where his heart thumps there, into the palm of Castiel’s hand. It’s almost like he’s holding it, in a way; keeping it as safe as he can even though it’s not Sam’s heart he should be worrying about protecting, not really, but it’s a part of him that Castiel _can_ protect.

He hums something in an ancient language that Sam can’t decipher, but it’s pretty. Then he says, “You’re welcome.”

Sam coughs out another laugh and then sighs. “I can’t even sleep anymore. I mean, I _can_ now, but not really. No more than an hour or two at a time. The nightmares, the… the _leeches_ , they came back and I think that They are… _Fuck._ ”

He trails off and scrubs his face against Castiel’s chest like he’s trying to wipe the encroaching madness off. “Don’t leave me here like this,” Sam says after a moment, forgetting his earlier remark about Castiel needing to ditch his crazy ass. He ignores his other thoughts because he just _cannot_ deal with them.

“I told you I am not going anywhere,” Castiel says and pulls away from Sam enough to kiss his forehead. “Now close your eyes,” he says softly as he runs his hand down Sam’s back then up again to that place between his shoulders where his heart beats strong and sure; saying nothing of Sam’s sickness in its constant, even thud-thump. “I’ll be here a while.”

“I’m afraid to,” Sam whispers back and Castiel hums more of his strange song. Sam digs his fingers into Castiel’s back so hard it would be painful to a man as he holds onto him like an anchor.

“I can’t heal your mind, but I may be able to keep the nightmares away for now,” Castiel says and Sam shakes head.

“For now,” Sam says around a chuff of unamused laughter. “But not always, right?”

“For now,” Castiel says back with another of his sad sighs. “But no, not always, they will become… unmanageable… after a while, I am afraid. I don’t know for sure though and I will still try.”

“Then… do it, _for now_ ,” Sam says after a long while spent listening to the hum of the clock and Castiel singing his weird lullaby.

“Of course,” Castiel says and reaches for Sam’s forehead.

Sam sits up; grabbing his arm to stop him and Castiel gives him a puzzled look. “Can you come with me? In my dreams? I know you trample around in Dean’s head sometimes, can you do the same with me?”

“Yes,” Castiel says with a faint smile that Sam wonders about. Maybe he’s been roosting in his head for ages, just watching like an overgrown owl or something. Sam shakes the thought away, Castiel is _not_ one of Them and he knows it just like he knows Dean isn’t. They don’t have maybe-maybe-not yellow coats for one thing. Sam bites the inside of his cheek so hard at that whispered thought that is _not_ his own that he tastes blood and forces himself to be still when he really wants to run. Just run until he _outruns_ all of this _shit_ in his mind, eating him alive in its own way.

“Take us someplace nice,” Sam says at last and lets go of Castiel’s wrist so he can settle down again.

“Of course,” Castiel says with another smile tinged with sadness as he brings his fingers up to touch Sam’s forehead again.

Around him oceans of alien flowers of such beauty Sam has never seen bloom right before his wondering eyes. Flowers no longer grow in Sam’s dreams, everything has been choked with weeds and poison dust inside his sleeping mind; has been for a while. Still marveling at the beauty before him, Sam leans back on his elbows in long, violet colored grass with a broad smile. Castiel joins him, standing beside Sam and looking up at the turquoise sun that paints everything with a pleasant blue-green filter.

“Thank you,” Sam says and tugs at the cuff of Castiel’s trousers to get him to sit with him in the long grass.

“Anything for you,” Castiel says back as he lowers himself down next to Sam, leaning into his warm side. They watch as overhead a purple dragon with scales that glitter like faceted amethyst turns cartwheels in the air.

Sam laughs with delight and takes Castiel’s hand in his. “This is amazing,” he says and smiles over at him.

There is only this left for them; it’s not much and soon it won’t be anything at all, Castiel thinks as he smiles back at Sam. He makes the amethyst dragon disappear in a roar of pink light drops that fall lazily toward the ground, soft as snow. Some become silver and opal butterflies that flutter away, leaving trails of gleaming dust in their wake. Others spring up multicolored irises wherever they touch this strange world of Sam’s dream that Castiel has designed.

As Sam looks on in wonder, Castiel understands that this must be what humans speak of when they say their heart is breaking.

 **  
**

**The End**

 **  
**


End file.
